Thursday, May 11, 2017

Trump won't recover from enslaving his voters (remember us?) to the vicious, multi-trillion dollar global warming scam: Trump authorized Sec. of State Tillerson to sign 'Fairbanks Declaration' which "calls for “the entry into force of the Paris Agreement on climate change and its implementation, and reiterating the need for global action to reduce both long-lived greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants”-Yahoo News, 5/11/17 (Key: String the rubes along by telling them document is only 'advisory')

"While President Trump has talked tough in the past about his skeptical views on climate change, his administration appears to be taking a more cautious approach to the
issue on the world stage in the early days of his presidency.

Trump
has repeatedly called into question the science behind climate change,
even calling it a “very expensive hoax.” During his 2016 campaign, Trump
promised to pull out of the Paris accord and his administration has
ordered cuts to funding for climate science and has slashed
environmental regulations....

The
Trump administration has not come out with a decision on whether the
U.S. will pull out of the Paris Climate accord.

The
Fairbanks proclamation says that “the Arctic is warming at more than
twice the rate of the global average, resulting in widespread social,
environmental, and economic impacts,” and notes “the pressing and
increasing need for mitigation and adaptation actions and to strengthen
resilience.”

When I first joined the American
Physical Society sixty-seven years agoit was much smaller, much
gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against
which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice
of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and
abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of
worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago,
when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific
issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on
the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as
physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is
an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further
enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief
Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists
beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In
the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President,
noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted
that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute
could there be?

How different it is now. The
giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the
raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much
more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional
jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being
an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am
forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the
Society.

So what has the APS, as an
organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the
corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us
sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS
ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a
hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its
better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and
indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more.
Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to
silence debate.

2. The appallingly tendentious
APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a
few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the
talents of APS members as I have long known them.So a few of us
petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of
(in) distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible,
which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In
response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled
to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety.
(They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the
poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position
supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original
statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory”
screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside
to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which
still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous
and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master
of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem
to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters
involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation
of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

4. So a few of us tried to bring
science into the act(that is, after all, the alleged and historic
purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to
the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking
that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of
physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the
nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures,
since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in
every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described
in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the
open.

5. To our amazement,
Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead
used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’
interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the
members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your
yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of
affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten
more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or
proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole
matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect
signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The
entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional
responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed
still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG,
simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the
problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the
merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost
confidence in the organization?

When Penn State absolved Mike
Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for
Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for
doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a
weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no
philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened
self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of
the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic
question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.